ABSTRACT
Research has demonstrated that students often over-use proportional strategies. The present paper tries to interpret this phenomenon from a dual process framework. Current dual process theories claim that analytic operations involve timeconsuming executive processing, whereas the heuristic system would operate fast and automatically. We set up an experiment to test the claim that proportional reasoning relies on heuristic-based processing, by experimentally manipulating students' time to solve proportional and nonproportional word problems. Results did not fully confirm our expectations, but there were indications that proportional reasoning is indeed heuristic-based.
